Katherine johnson nasa engineer3/16/2023 In 1952, during the wedding of James Globe’s sister, James’s brother-in-law, Eric Epps, offered to find jobs for James and Katherine in Virginia. However, she soon withdrew due to her pregnancy with the first of her three children. At West Virginia University in Morgantown, Globe became one of three black students, and the first black woman, to enroll in a master’s program where she studied advanced mathematics. In 1940, West Virginia’s governor decided to desegregate graduate schools following the Gaines vs. There, she met James Globe, a chemistry teacher whom she married in 1932 before moving back to West Virginia. Jobs for mathematicians were difficult to find and she began teaching at the Carnegie High School for African-American children in Marion, Virginia. Claytor tailored courses for her and she graduated in 1937, summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and French. In 1933 she entered West Virginia State College at the age of fifteen, where her teachers included the brilliant African-American mathematician, William Schieffelin Claytor. During holidays, she worked at the Greenbrier, a resort where her father worked and where she improved her French with the help of a Parisian chef. The school was run by West Virginia State College on the outskirts of Charleston, capital of West Virginia. Katherine Coleman was the youngest of four.īecause the county where the Colemans lived offered no secondary education for African-Americans, the Colemans rented a house near an high school that Katherine entered at the age of ten. Her father, Joshua Coleman, was also a self-taught mathematician who took on jobs as a lumberjack and farmer. Her legacy, and that of the other early human computers, is literally written in the stars.Katherine Johnson was born Creola Katherine Coleman in the town of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She is currently working on NASA’s mission to Jupiter. Now 80 and NASA’s longest-serving female employee, Sue Finley was originally hired in 1958 to work on trajectory computations for rocket launches, and is now a software tester and subsystem engineer. One of the earliest human computers still works at JPL. A physicist, space scientist and mathematician, Johnson provided the calculations for Alan Shepherd’s historic first flight into space, John Glenn’s ground-breaking orbit of the earth and the trajectory for Apollo 11’s moon landing. Katherine Johnson- who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 by President Barack Obama-joined the team at Langley in 1953. That same year, Mary Jackson joined her team, working on the supersonic pressure tunnel project that tested data from wind tunnel and flight experiments. In 1951, Vaughan became the first African American manager at Langley and started, like her cohorts on the West coast, to hire women. Already having to ride in the colored section of a segregated bus, she was put to work in the “colored” computers section. (Credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)Ī remarkable group of African American women, working at what would become NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, were breaking down their own gender and racial barriers. US President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to NASA mathematician and physicist Katherine Johnson at the White House. Way ahead of her time, she offered her employees her own version of unpaid maternity leave, rehiring them after they had left to give birth. It took supervisors like Ling to think outside the box. At a time when maternity leave did not exist, pregnancy could be detrimental to a women’s career. Ling actively hired women who didn’t have an engineering education, encouraging them to attend night school. Helen Ling was one such supervisor who followed in Roberts’ footsteps. Roberts set a precedent for future female supervisors who made it their job to hire women, often taking a chance on young women right out of college. When tasked with building out her team, she made the decision to hire only women, believing men would undermine the cohesion of the group and not take direction well from a woman. Coming to engineering later in life, she was meticulous and driven, rising through the ranks and becoming a supervisor in 1942. Macie Roberts was about 20 years older than the other computers working at JPL. Helen Ling is at the second desk in the left row. Barbara Paulson is on the telephone (standing, back left). Macie Roberts’ computing group circa 1955 (far right).
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